Hi Everyone,
Glad to see some other FrameMaker users out there, as I've been feeling on a bit lonesome lately on my new position.
A bit of background... I was recently hired as a contractor to help a company maintain and re-do some FrameMaker documentation in a Structured environment. Big manuals, many 300+ pages, full of diagrams, tables, etc. I am the only FrameMaker user here, having previously been experienced with unstructured FrameMaker, but not with structured...
One of my primary tasks is to convert old unstructured framemaker documents, as well as non-framemaker documents (interleaf) into Structured Framemaker. A previous contractor made an attempt at setting up some Master EDD docs as well as Master Style templates, which do work for new documents, but I'm not convinced that they are really set up correctly for the main task of being a recepticle for converting these other docs.
So, here's a few questions I have:
1. Is my thought correct that if the main goal is to convert into Structured Frame, then the main templates and EDD may possibly need some extra elements and hierarchy that is specifically there to help be able to make the conversion to Structured more automatable via conversion tables?
2. A big difficulty I am having is with Tables. I can't seem to quite grasp the best or correct way to do tables within the Structured format. Should there be one element that is called "Table" that works for all tables, and then this is wrapped in something to identify the formatting for a specific type of table? Or should each type of table be it's own independent element? Or is there no choice on this? I can't tell if there are standard pre-defined table elements that I shouldn't be messing with, or whether these need to be defined by me?
3. For example, the previous person who set up the EDD (or modified some other EDD, to be more precise), has different names for the standard table elements. For example, instead of what I presume are the standard TITLE, HEADING, BODY, FOOTING, ROW, CELL, there are elements called THead, Tbody, Tfoot, Trow, Tentry, and one called TGroup that is not a standard table part. Is this good practice to have these be different? Or is this just creating an extra layer of confusion? I can't seem to be able to use the conversion table to get this stuff to heirarch these correctly, but I don't know if it is somehow because of the different names, and I should be referencing these table elements somehow differently.
Well, as you can see, I am a bit lost. Any thoughts, words of wisdom, or examples of good ways to do things would be appreciated.
Thanks!
Darren